Mad Men, “Three Sundays”: dead on arrival

“Don’t you love the chase? Sometimes it doesn’t work out, but those are the stakes.” – Roger

“Three Sundays” is the fourth episode of Mad Men Season 2. What’s new and what’s happening?

As the episode title suggests, this episode takes place over a specific timeline, set in April of 1962.

Sunday, April 8^th, 1962

• We know this is the date by way of the handout at The Church of the Holy Innocents in Brooklyn, New York, which Peggy and her family attend.
• Meanwhile, Don and Betty have a super boozy Sunday Fun Day at home. Sally continues her bartender-in-training duties. “Thank you, Jeeves,” Don tells her. The booze-athon ends when little Bobby breaks the bed, and mom and pop realize that they’ve forgotten to feed their children.
• Roger’s family is out at a fancy-looking dinner in Manhattan, where we learn that daughter Margaret (Elizabeth Rice), who seemed to be a teenager back in Season 1, is not engaged to a guy named Brooks.

Monday, April 9^th, 1962

• Ken and Pete entertain a client, Marty from Gorton’s, where we also meet Vicky the high-end call girl. When Roger drops by, he takes a liking to her and eventually avails himself of her services. “But I want everything I want,” he later tells her.
• Back at Sterling Cooper, Bobbie Barrett stops by the office and tells Don that she and Jimmy Barrett are pitching a TV show called Grin and Barrett that’s a derivative idea based off of Candid Camera. Bobbie, uh… pitches other things while she’s there as well.
• At the Draper residence, little Bobby continues to break bad, and literally breaks the record player.

Sunday, April 15^th, 1962

• Duck calls Don at home to inform him that the American Airlines pitch (stemming from the airplane crash and subsequent events from “Flight 1”) has moved up, so it’s all hands-on deck. Bobby decides to quickly break even badder at this moment, burning himself on the stove, so Don is forced to take Sally with him to the office while Betty takes her son to the emergency room.

Friday, April 20^th, 1962

• It’s the day of the big American Airlines meeting. It’s set up that this is going to be yet another masterful and/or fateful advertising pitch by Don Draper and crew, but instead, Duck Phillips enters the boardroom by himself and announces that Shel Kenneally has been fired. Sterling Cooper will make the pitch, but it will be received DOA. Dead on arrival. It’s a huge fail for Duck and a huge fail for the firm: they dropped Mohawk Airlines just to have this shot.
• Back at Chez Draper, Bobby’s breaking bad – his messing around with his toy robot causes him to tip over Sally’s drink – causes things to boil over between his parents, and Don ends up smashing the robot against the wall. Bobby’s subsequent apology is adorable and a bit heart breaking, partially because while Don is an awful person in some ways and no candidate for Father of the Year, he does love his children and wants to be a good parent on some level.

Sunday, April 22^nd, 1962

• It’s Easter Sunday, and at the church in Brooklyn, Father Gill drops a bomb of sorts on Peggy: he alludes to the fact that he’s aware that she had a child out of wedlock. Sister Anita had told the good padre this during confession, which brings up all kinds of ethical weirdness (I think?) that Father Gill would reveal to Peggy that he knew about that.

Mad Men, “Three Sundays”: do we meet anyone new?

• Father Gill, played by Colin Hanks (son of Tom), makes his first appearance.
• We also meet more members of Peggy’s family out in Brooklyn, including Gerry and Anita.

Things you might notice after watching the entire Mad Men series a bunch of times

• The focus on Peggy’s family life during Season 2 has its compelling moments, but overall it’s one of the least rewatchable story arcs over the course of Mad Men.
• Roger and his wife Mona (Talia Balsam) are married in real life. Also: Balsam shows up on Homeland (she’s great in everything).
• I’ve heard series creator Matthew Weiner talk about how 1962 is an idealized time in American history – it’s Beach Blanket Bingo at the movies, the middle of the Camelot presidency of John F. Kennedy, and before the series of shocking events both domestic (JFK’s assassination, for one) and foreign (the Cuban Missile Crisis in late ’62 and, later, the Vietnam War) help drive radical change across American culture.
• The creative process at Sterling Cooper, showcased in the preparation for the American Airlines presentation, is always one of the most fascinating and rewatchable aspects of Mad Men.
• We as the audience don’t get to see the actual American Airlines pitch. It’s the first time that Mad Men has played with our expectations in terms of not delivering the masterful Don Draper Experience that we’ve come to expect based on past glories such as Lucky Strike and Kodak. And from here on out, those Peak Draper moments will be fewer and far in between.
• When Don reveals to Betty that his father “beat the hell out of him” when he was a kid, we’re reminded of how little Betty knows her husband. And of course there’s a vast amount that the audience knows that she does not at this point in the series.

Mad Men, “Three Sundays”: fun quotes

• “Love that frozen scrod.” – Roger
• “You have big ones. My mommy has big ones too.” – Sally to Joan
• “We got a lot of bricks, but I don’t know what the building looks like.” – Don
• “Is that your maid?” – Sally to Paul, referring to the picture of his girlfriend, Sheila
• “Pack your Wrigley’s and go home.” – Bert Cooper, firing a secretary after stepping on gum in his socks
• “There is no such thing as American history. Only a frontier.” – Don
• “Don’t you love the chase? Sometimes it doesn’t work out, but those are the stakes.” – Roger
• “What do you want to hear?” – Don to Betty

Mad Men, “Three Sundays”: other odds and ends

• It’s really fun to get to see what Sterling Cooper employees end up wearing when rushed back to work on the weekend. Pete is hilarious in his tennis wear and short shorts, for example.
• The confessional is a strange and fascinating concept for non-Catholics.

Some stats and info about Mad Men, “Three Sundays”

TV SHOW – Mad Men
SEASON/EPISODE – Season 2, Episode 4
AIRED ON – August 17th, 2008
NETWORK/STREAMING SERVICE – FX
GENRE – Drama, Relationship Shows, Office Culture, Period Shows
CREATED BY – Mathew Weiner  
CAST – Jon Hamm, Elisabeth Moss, Vincent Kartheiser, January Jones, Christina Hendricks, Aaron Staton, Rich Sommer, John Slattery, Kiernan Shipka, Robert Morse, Christopher Stanley, Jessica Pare, Jay R. Ferguson, Michael Gladis, Bryan Batt, Alison Brie, Jared Harris, Kevin Rahm, Mason Cotton, Ben Feldman, Mark Moses, Anne Dudek, Maggie Siff, Joel Murray, Harry Hamlin, Talia Balsam, James Wolk

This review originally appeared on TV Geek Army.